


lake-bodied boy

by atiredonnie



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Character Study, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Poetry, many thoughts. head killua
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2020-12-09
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:02:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27976275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atiredonnie/pseuds/atiredonnie
Summary: There is something sharp and violent and anguished in the corner of your apple-shaped heart, hungry with need, and the boy in front of you is skeletal on the inside. He pushes out love to make way for regret.Killua comes of age.
Relationships: Gon Freecs/Killua Zoldyck
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21





	lake-bodied boy

The sun filters through your ribcage like fish.

Neatly sliced salmon, pink and red and gold. You remember the sound of a bone separating from skin, punching upwards, a hole cut messily into wrapping paper. You remember the sloughing meat. Crushed stars decorate the heated-car interior of your guts, permafrost white. Mom buried you in ice, in a time present like a blue-black bruise, filling up the crevices of your mouth with snow and silence. The wind blotted out your eyes. 

You breathe like a dying man, now - there is time to inhale air. You feel like the wrong side of a fire door, burned-out and empty, pockets of air and plastic bubbling up and out and apart. The pale slash of your arm cuts through the dark and the dirt and you recall that this is not you. 

Insufferably, unendingly, you experience everything all at once on the grass. Undying desperation, the wanting like lightning bugs, the simple crack of the femur, like a birthday present, like cleaving a man into two. You scream out into the earth. 

Neurons flicker and die, a spectrum of electricity and smoke, 

And your hands grope at a space beyond the eyelids, a thin cold line of hate and pain. You pull the plug, you pop the cork, and resentment bleeds out of you like a dying faucet. Salt stains the curve of your brow. You kill out of obligation. You will die out of love. 

You’re in the palace and your heart is severed neatly from your chest, held up as if a trophy, and you’re distinctly not thinking of the years of people incubating in the marble - you cannot think of anything but yourself, wrung out and on the floor, sobbing until the violin-thick cords of your throat snap and flow with blood. He doesn’t need you. Light pulses behind his skin like a secret. He’s drowning and he doesn’t need you. 

You’re dead on the floor. You’re alive in the hospital and he’s waiting for you on the other side of the landline, and you are torn apart by something other than the gaping void of distance, there’s a disconnect in the curve of his mouth and the plane of your jaw, and there’s something there you cannot understand - 

The moon is like a cherry and you try to remember why you thought that. The moon isn’t red. What astonishes you is the singing. 

A cat crouches maternally over a body, cotton and scrap metal and eyes huge and gold and full of candlelight. You understand less and less every day, you think despairingly, and the hollowness of the walls echoes like a wail. Gon leaves you. He leaves you. 

Your muscles burn with lactic acid and the familiar spark of living bones, and the flesh bending underneath your punches, the pliability of your knuckles, is so normal you want to cry. Being good is hard, and the fact that you’re so bad at it just reinforces that thought. 

There’s a girl on your back and she weighs absolutely nothing, eyes flat mirrors, and you drop her on the ground unceremoniously, incandescent. There’s a woman made out of ink and mermaid scales and you hate her in a way you thought you had outgrown, but she’s older and sadder and knows more than you do, unquestioningly, miserably. She looks through gutted-pike eyes and a million years of pain flicker across her face in a single second, an oil painting smearing at the edges, colors blurring together and dying on the canvas. She doesn’t need to tell you what’s wrong - you understand more than you’ve ever understood anything. 

You’re running through the forest, adrenaline coursing through you, molten iron, the sheen of desperate sweat suspended in the air. Your legs move like a question through the dark, the answer to which you’re not ready, not ready, not ready to get. Sky-colored space folds for you. Argon sizzles on your tongue, but you barely notice it, barely notice anything but the soft animal of your body charging dreamlike through the curled-up, fetal, army ivy.

Beetle-cobalt blood drips from a crushed skull, languid streams of nightshade flowering out from a crumpled fist of shattered teeth. Pitou twitches at the base of a tree, tears flowing freely, lily-white skin raw and pulled apart, a cloth doll of flinching, jitterbug movement. 

Gon stretches up, up, up, an arrow pointing neatly towards the moon, sea-black hair and tired eyes. Your mouth forms something resembling words without sound, slow and quivering and open with blind shock. Fire moves, a parasite beneath his see-through skin, grotesque curve of muscle betraying white-hot grimaces pressed flush up against the tendon. 

He looks at you and grief

expands

from each and every labored breath.

The bellows fill up and let go. The gallows are lovely and blue. 

He tells you he’s okay. You are not okay. There is something sharp and violent and anguished in the corner of your apple-shaped heart, hungry with need, and the boy in front of you is skeletal on the inside. He pushes out love to make way for regret. The last possible thing on the horizon, the pinprick lights of slightly-stifled remorse, a hand muffling wild cries, for you, for you, for you. You are a room with every light turned off. 

Pitou moves, a dancer at midnight, and the ballet compounds with the sound of your sneakers smudging against raw soil, too hummingbird-scared and prey animal to silence the rubber burn, but you’re still not fast enough. Marrow pours outwards like wine but Gon never looks at them, only looks at you, eyes two dark jewels. 

And then he turns. And then he looks away. 

Pitou hits the ground and the sun falls from the sky, wound-up toy body and machine-gun arm, and you scream and you watch him die right there. 

It wasn’t enough. It should’ve been enough for you to love him like that. It wasn’t. 

You carry him home on your shoulders. Spidersilk hair breathlessly sweeps across the water-stained undergrowth. Someone has to leave first, you think, helpless and stupid and _young_. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.

(Your mourning clings, like a second skin, like a rhyme without reason. Love-slaughtered magpies, Icarus descending.)


End file.
